Many Arab Sunnis in Iraq clearly want to [accept the new reality and reconstruct their lives on the basis of equal common citizenship.] But they are caught between two fires. On one side, they fear that the Shias will wreak revenge upon them. On the other, they are called on to join the so-called "resistance" that faces American and coalition weaponry. But aside from the physical risk of supporting the terrorist faction, the Arab Sunnis in Iraq have learned from the experience of the people of Fallujah, who briefly lived under the dominance of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Wahhabi bandits, that a Taliban- or Saudi-style regime controlled by the latter will terrorize the rank and file of the Arab Sunnis as much or more than it will strike against the Americans and their coalition partners.

It is for that reason -- real fear of the terrorists by ordinary local Sunnis -- that Iraqis have been replaced in so many of their operations by so-called "foreign fighters," many of them Saudis. As I reported in the New York Post and The Weekly Standard not long ago, 20-year old Ahmad Sayyid Ahmad al-Ghamdi, perpetrator of the December 21 bombing of the American mess hall in Mosul, which killed 22 people, was the son of a Saudi diplomat. Indeed, I have since learned that al-Ghamdi was carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport when he committed his terrible act.

Western media and governments hesitate, for unfathomable reasons, to pay close attention to the role of the Saudis in the Iraqi fighting. But Western journalists of a liberal bent are especially hypnotized by the false paradigm of "U.S. invasion vs. Iraqi insurgents," when the basis of the conflict is very different. Rather, the Iraqi terror offensive has its roots in homicidal Wahhabi, i.e. fanatical Sunni, hatred of Shia Muslims.